West that the distinctive work of the English was achieved during this period, by the establishment of a series of colonies unlike any other European settlements which had yet been instituted.  Their distinctive feature was self-government, to which they owed their steadily increasing prosperity.  No other European colonies were thus managed on the principle of autonomy.  Indeed, these English settlements were in 1650 the only self-governing lands in the world, apart from England herself, the United Provinces, and Switzerland.

The first English colony, Virginia, was planted in 1608 by a trading company organised for the purpose, whose subscribers included nearly all the London City Companies, and about seven hundred private individuals of all ranks.  Their motives were partly political (’to put a bit in the ancient enemy’s (Spain’s) mouth’), and partly commercial, for they hoped to find gold, and to render England independent of the marine supplies which came from the Baltic.  But profit was not their sole aim; they were moved also by the desire to plant a new England beyond the seas.  They made, in fact, no profits; but they did create a branch of the English stock, and the young squires’ and yeomen’s sons who formed the backbone of the colony showed themselves to be Englishmen by their unwillingness to submit to an uncontrolled direction of their affairs.  In 1619, acting on instructions received from England, the company’s governor summoned an assembly of representatives, one from each township, to consult on the needs of the colony.  This was the first representative body that had ever existed outside Europe, and it indicated what was to be the character of English colonisation.  Henceforth the normal English method of governing a colony was through a governor and an executive council appointed by the Crown or its delegate, and a representative assembly, which wielded full control over local legislation and taxation.  ‘Our present happiness,’ said the Virginian Assembly in 1640, ’is exemplified by the freedom of annual assemblies and by legal trials by juries in all civil and criminal causes.’

The second group of English colonies, those of New England, far to the north of Virginia, reproduced in an intensified form this note of self-government.  Founded in the years following 1620, these settlements were the outcome of Puritan discontents in England.  The commercial motive was altogether subsidiary in their establishment; they existed in order that the doctrine and discipline of Puritanism might find a home where its ascendancy would be secure.  It was indeed under the guise of a commercial company that the chief of these settlements was made, but the company was organised as a means of safe-guarding the colonists from Crown interference, and at an early date its headquarters were transferred to New England itself.  Far from desiring to restrict this freedom, the Crown up to a point encouraged it.  Winthrop, one of the leading colonists, tells us that he had